Ship ack-grep with debathena-extra-software-nox

[vasilvv]

ack-grep is a source code search tool which is one of the things I first install manually on most machines I have because it's highly useful for looking through code and configuration files and it's better (interface-wise) than 'grep -R'. I see no reason not to ship it with extra-software-nox.

[andersk]

Replying to vasilvv:

I see no reason not to ship it with extra-software-nox.

 Here’s one. Not an important one, but worth considering.

[geofft]

See MetapackagePolicy#debathena-extra-software. It's unclear to me whether this qualifies, but if it's small, it might. But, bear in mind that the criterion is reasons *to* ship it, not reasons *not* to ship it.

For instance, is there a reason to ship this in the release, as opposed to just installing it in the sipb or outland locker? (Tangentially, if you put it in a locker, you can name it just "ack", not "ack-grep".)

As a matter of personal opinion, in my limited experience with ack, I found it not much more useful to me than grep (and anti-useful, since its default whitelist was too conservative for my use cases), and certainly less useful than git grep. My bashrc sets GREP_OPTIONS to --exclude-dir=.svn --exclude-dir=.bzr --exclude-dir=.git, which addresses the reason I wanted something other than grep. (I also have --color=auto.)